Share this story

In 1878, the American scholar and minister Sebastian Adams put the final touches on the third edition of his grandest project: a massive Synchronological Chart that covers nothing less than the entire history of the world in parallel, with the deeds of kings and kingdoms running along together in rows over 25 horizontal feet of paper. When the chart reaches 1500 BCE, its level of detail becomes impressive; at 400 CE it becomes eyebrow-raising; at 1300 CE it enters the realm of the wondrous. No wonder, then, that in their 2013 book Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline, authors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton call Adams' chart "nineteenth-century America's surpassing achievement in complexity and synthetic power... a great work of outsider thinking."

The chart is also the last thing that visitors to Kentucky's Creation Museum see before stepping into the gift shop, where full-sized replicas can be purchased for $40.

Further Reading

That's because, in the world described by the museum, Adams' chart is more than a historical curio; it remains an accurate timeline of world history. Time is said to have begun in 4004 BCE with the creation of Adam, who went on to live for 930 more years. In 2348 BCE, the Earth was then reshaped by a worldwide flood, which created the Grand Canyon and most of the fossil record even as Noah rode out the deluge in an 81,000 ton wooden ark. Pagan practices at the eight-story high Tower of Babel eventually led God to cause a "confusion of tongues" in 2247 BCE, which is why we speak so many different languages today.

Adams notes on the second panel of the chart that "all the history of man, before the flood, extant, or known to us, is found in the first six chapters of Genesis."

Ken Ham agrees. Ham, CEO of Answers in Genesis (AIG), has become perhaps the foremost living young Earth creationist in the world. He has authored more books and articles than seems humanly possible and has built AIG into a creationist powerhouse. He also made national headlines when the slickly modern Creation Museum opened in 2007.

He has also been looking for the opportunity to debate a prominent supporter of evolution.

And so it was that, as a severe snow and sleet emergency settled over the Cincinnati region, 900 people climbed into cars and wound their way out toward the airport to enter the gates of the Creation Museum. They did not come for the petting zoo, the zip line, or the seasonal camel rides, nor to see the animatronic Noah chortle to himself about just how easy it had really been to get dinosaurs inside his Ark. They did not come to see The Men in White, a 22-minute movie that plays in the museum's halls in which a young woman named Wendy sees that what she's been taught about evolution "doesn't make sense" and is then visited by two angels who help her understand the truth of six-day special creation. They did not come to see the exhibits explaining how all animals had, before the Fall of humanity into sin, been vegetarians.

Further Reading

They came to see Ken Ham debate TV presenter Bill Nye the Science Guy—an old-school creation v. evolution throwdown for the Powerpoint age. Even before it began, the debate had been good for both men. Traffic to AIG's website soared by 80 percent, Nye appeared on CNN, tickets sold out in two minutes, and post-debate interviews were lined up with Piers Morgan Live and MSNBC.

While plenty of Ham supporters filled the parking lot, so did people in bow ties and "Bill Nye is my Homeboy" T-shirts. They all followed the stamped dinosaur tracks to the museum's entrance, where a pack of AIG staffers wearing custom debate T-shirts stood ready to usher them into "Discovery Hall."

Security at the Creation Museum is always tight; the museum's security force is made up of sworn (but privately funded) Kentucky peace officers who carry guns, wear flat-brimmed state trooper-style hats, and operate their own K-9 unit. For the debate, Nye and Ham had agreed to more stringent measures. Visitors passed through metal detectors complete with secondary wand screenings, packages were prohibited in the debate hall itself, and the outer gates were closed 15 minutes before the debate began.

Inside the hall, packed with bodies and the blaze of high-wattage lights, the temperature soared. The empty stage looked—as everything at the museum does—professionally designed, with four huge video screens, custom debate banners, and a pair of lecterns sporting Mac laptops. 20 different video crews had set up cameras in the hall, and 70 media organizations had registered to attend. More than 10,000 churches were hosting local debate parties. As AIG technical staffers made final preparations, one checked the YouTube-hosted livestream—242,000 people had already tuned in before start time.

An AIG official took the stage eight minutes before start time. "We know there are people who disagree with each other in this room," he said. "No cheering or—please—any disruptive behavior."

At 6:59pm, the music stopped and the hall fell silent but for the suddenly prominent thrumming of the air conditioning. For half a minute, the anticipation was electric, all eyes fixed on the stage, and then the countdown clock ticked over to 7:00pm and the proceedings snapped to life. Nye, wearing his traditional bow tie, took the stage from the left; Ham appeared from the right. The two shook hands in the center to sustained applause, and CNN's Tom Foreman took up his moderating duties.

Ham had won the coin toss backstage and so stepped to his lectern to deliver brief opening remarks. "Creation is the only viable model of historical science confirmed by observational science in today's modern scientific era," he declared, blasting modern textbooks for "imposing the religion of atheism" on students.

"We're teaching people to think critically!" he said. "It's the creationists who should be teaching the kids out there."

And we were off.

Two kinds of science

Digging in the fossil fields of Colorado or North Dakota, scientists regularly uncover the bones of ancient creatures. No one doubts the existence of the bones themselves; they lie on the ground for anyone to observe or weigh or photograph. But in which animal did the bones originate? How long ago did that animal live? What did it look like? One of Ham's favorite lines is that the past "doesn't come with tags"—so the prehistory of a stegosaurus thigh bone has to be interpreted by scientists, who use their positions in the present to reconstruct the past.

For mainstream scientists, this is simply an obvious statement of our existential position. Until a real-life Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown finds a way to power a Delorean with a 1.21 gigawatt flux capacitor in order to shoot someone back through time to observe the flaring-forth of the Universe, the formation of the Earth, or the origins of life, or the prehistoric past can't be known except by interpretation. Indeed, this isn't true only of prehistory; as Nye tried to emphasize, forensic scientists routinely use what they know of nature's laws to reconstruct past events like murders.

For Ham, though, science is broken into two categories, "observational" and "historical," and only observational science is trustworthy. In the initial 30 minute presentation of his position, Ham hammered the point home.

"You don't observe the past directly," he said. "You weren't there."

Ham spoke with the polish of a man who has covered this ground a hundred times before, has heard every objection, and has a smooth answer ready for each one.

In Ham's world, only changes that we can observe directly are the proper domain of science. Thus, when confronted with the issue of speciation, Ham readily admits that contemporary lab experiments on fast-breeding creatures like mosquitoes can produce new species. But he says that's simply "micro-evolution" below the family level. He doesn't believe that scientists can observe "macro-evolution," such as the alteration of a lobe-finned fish into a tiger over millions of years.

Because they can't see historical events unfold, scientists must rely on reconstructions of the past. Those might be accurate, but they simply rely on too many "assumptions" for Ham to trust them. When confronted during the debate with evidence from ancient trees which have more rings than there are years on the Adams Sychronological Chart, Ham simply shrugged.

"We didn't see those layers laid down," he said.

To him, the calculus of "one ring, one year" is merely an assumption when it comes to the past—an assumption possibly altered by cataclysmic events such as Noah's flood.

In other words, "historical science" is dubious; we should defer instead to the "observational" account of someone who witnessed all past events: God, said to have left humanity an eyewitness account of the world's creation in the book of Genesis. All historical reconstructions should thus comport with this more accurate observational account.

Mainstream scientists don't recognize this divide between observational and historical ways of knowing (much as they reject Ham's distinction between "micro" and "macro" evolution). Dinosaur bones may not come with tags, but neither does observed contemporary reality—think of a doctor presented with a set of patient symptoms, who then has to interpret what she sees in order to arrive at a diagnosis.

Given that the distinction between two kinds of science provides Ham's key reason for accepting the "eyewitness account" of Genesis as a starting point, it was unsurprising to see Nye take generous whacks at the idea. You can't observe the past? "That's what we do in astronomy," said Nye in his opening presentation. Since light takes time to get here, "All we can do in astronomy is look at the past. By the way, you're looking at the past right now."

Those in the present can study the past with confidence, Nye said, because natural laws are generally constant and can be used to extrapolate into the past.

"This idea that you can separate the natural laws of the past from the natural laws you have now is at the heart of our disagreement," Nye said. "For lack of a better word, it's magical. I've appreciated magic since I was a kid, but it's not what we want in mainstream science."

How do scientists know that these natural laws are correctly understood in all their complexity and interplay? What operates as a check on their reconstructions? That's where the predictive power of evolutionary models becomes crucial, Nye said. Those models of the past should generate predictions which can then be verified—or disproved—through observations in the present.

For instance, evolutionary models suggest that land-based tetrapods can all be traced back to primitive, fish-like creatures that first made their way out of the water and onto solid ground—creatures that aren't quite lungfish and yet aren't quite amphibians. For years, there was a big gap in the fossil record around this expected transition. Then, in 2004, a research team found a number of these "fishapods" in the Canadian Arctic.

"Tiktaalik looks like a cross between the primitive fish it lived amongst and the first four-legged animals," wrote the research team as they introduced their discovery to the world.

"What we want in science—science as practiced on the outside—is the ability to predict," said Nye, pointing to the examples of Tiktaalik in biological evolution and the results of the Cosmic Background Explorer mission in cosmology. Mainstream scientific predictions, even those focused on the past, can in fact be tested against reality. So far, however, "Mr. Ham and his worldview does not have this capability," Nye said. "It cannot make predictions and show results."

1229 Reader Comments

From the perspective of an earth creature a literal day is 24 hours. In fact our internal clocks and wake/sleep cycles are compatible with Earth's day. But, what is a day from the perspective of a creature living on another planet or in another part of the universe. Or, in another dimension, which if you understand certain scientific theories, clearly exist.

From the perspective of an earth creature a literal day is 24 hours. In fact our internal clocks and wake/sleep cycles are compatible with Earth's day. But, what is a day from the perspective of a creature living on another planet or in another part of the universe. Or, in another dimension, which if you understand certain scientific theories, clearly exist.

Dimensions proposed by science have little to do with the "other dimensions" described by sci-fi and fantasy shows.

Quote:

The issue here is how many of us simply believe that we are alone. But, someone who studies the genome looks at it and is in awe of the intricacies of it's algorithms and the genius of its logic. How well thought out and how so much complexity can be organized to result in a living creature. There is so much for us to still learn and understand. It's a shame if any group closes their mind to competing theories. Evolution is unsatisfactory to many of us, you don't walk away thinking you have the answer. In fact, it raises more questions and never clearly provides the mechanisms of the spark that created the initial complex codings that exist even in the most "simple" of micro organisms.

Yes, there is much to learn. But just like every other mystery that science has solved, there will not be any god to be found.

Evolution is unsatisfactory to you because you don't understand it, and demand that science be able to describe in precise detail exactly how everything happened right now.

And the origin of life is not evolution!!!! If you want to be taken seriously in a discussion about evolution, don't conflate them.

Quote:

Write a random generator, truly random if you can. Have it randomly spit out characters. After every generation, try to bring those characters to life by compiling them in a simple compiler and try to execute them. Do this for the equivalent of trillions of years in computer cycle time. You will never get anything to generate a "hello world" or anything close to that. Mathematical probability says its impossible. And that's with the help of an intelligent human providing the computer and the original generators. Evolution is grossly unsatisfactory as a theory to anyone who has searched beyond these pedestrian debates.

1) No, your example is not mathematically impossible. It is just extremely improbable. Anything improbable extended to infinity is going to happen.

2) Evolution is NOT like a random code generator. Evolution starts with Program A, reproduces 100 copies of Program A, Aprime, with a handful of random changes, and a filter exists to eliminate those Aprime programs that do bad things and keeps those that do better things, which then go on to produce Aprimeprime programs. Further, the genome is not like a computer program, so don't go and trying to compare single changes in computer code to single changes in a genome.

Write a random generator, truly random if you can. Have it randomly spit out characters. After every generation, try to bring those characters to life by compiling them in a simple compiler and try to execute them. Do this for the equivalent of trillions of years in computer cycle time. You will never get anything to generate a "hello world" or anything close to that. Mathematical probability says its impossible. And that's with the help of an intelligent human providing the computer and the original generators. Evolution is grossly unsatisfactory as a theory to anyone who has searched beyond these pedestrian debates.

A problem with this random text generator analogy (I read about this somewhere, if someone can find the source please do so) is that evolution isn't completely random - it keeps beneficial changes. Someone incorporated this into a random text generator by choosing a target phrase and then randomly generating text - when a particular position in the string had the correct letter, that letter was kept there in subsequent permutations. This random text generator could produce "TO BE OR NOT TO BE" in a few minutes, and the entirety of Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' in about 4.5 days of computational time. That obviously represents a lot of generations, but the point remains - arriving at a sophisticated endpoint through random means is viable if you allow that the random system can identify and retain small random changes that bring it closer to a larger goal, rather than starting over from scratch after every permutation.

The issue here is how many of us simply believe that we are alone. But, someone who studies the genome looks at it and is in awe of the intricacies of it's algorithms and the genius of its logic. How well thought out and how so much complexity can be organized to result in a living creature.

Living creatures and their genes don't look "well thought out." Let me introduce you to The Onion Test. If living things were so well planned, why do some onions have two to four times as much DNA as their functionally identical relatives? And why does the "simplest" onion genome need twice as much DNA as humans? That's with the benefit of selection already pruning a lot of DNA from our respective genomes. If this was a software project, it would be decried as terrible design and bloated, obfuscated, spaghetti code written by incompetent, feckless, and neglectful devs with no sense of code architecture or maintainability.

Quote:

It's a shame if any group closes their mind to competing theories.

For something to qualify as a "competing theory," it first has to measure up to the definition of "theory." No form of Creationism, from YEC to Intelligent Design, even comes close.

Quote:

In fact, it raises more questions and never clearly provides the mechanisms of the spark that created the initial complex codings that exist even in the most "simple" of micro organisms.

That's a task for the separate theory of Abiogenesis. Evolution applies once there is something there to evolve in the first place.

Quote:

Write a random generator, truly random if you can. Have it randomly spit out characters.

This is nothing at all like either evolution or abiogenesis. In the real world, biology is constrained by the laws of physics and chemistry. Neither of those are "truly random." If they were, they wouldn't even work as sciences. You could put a few atoms of gold and a few atoms of oxygen together in a flask and have a completely random result: sometimes they'd combine, sometimes they wouldn't. That's not how chemistry actually works. Chemistry is orderly and systematic because there are underlying rules that prevent outcomes from being truly random. That's why there's a pattern to the Periodic Table, that's why some chemicals behave differently from others, and that's why any analogy with an RNG is completely inapplicable. You're only demonstrating your ignorance of basic science when you make it. You can't maintain that kind of belief about the chemistry of life if you've ever gone through a middle-school chem lab. Right from the start, some of the possible outcomes of an RNG can be eliminated from consideration. Anything that simulates gold combining with oxygen at room temperatures, for example, is out. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen all have a higher probability of combining with each other than many other elements do. That enhances the probabilities associated with those atoms forming molecules. Wouldn't you know it, those atoms make up the vast majority of molecules necessary for life! The amount of effort and repetition needed to create living things from simpler chemistry is instantly and extremely reduced compared to your model of random physics and random chemistry. Funny how even a slight grounding in reality makes abiogenesis seem more likely than in your ungrounded view.

Try again when you can show us you've had a basic secondary school education in the sciences. Then you might be ready to learn more things about abiogenesis and evolution. Soon you might even be able to speak competently about them.

This is the problem with the evolutionary backing responses. You ask why the sky is blue and the reply is your too young to understand.

The more we study the genome the more we learn that "Junk DNA" is a cop out. It's a a way for a lazy researcher to say, since I don't understand it, it must be "junk". A big part of the Onion's "junk" DNA is now understood to provide structural support. The "junk" DNA in humans is now understood to provide a repositary of data for the functioning DNA to draw from. Interesting how the "junk" twists and bends in close proximity to the code that accesses it.

No algorithms in DNA coding, you're kidding right? We study the code to understand how difficult problems are solved and we emulate it the best we can.

Evolution is not about genesis, because it can't be about it. It fails to satisfy and to those who look at it as an explanation for the diversity around us, it fails to satisfy that as well. One day evolution will simply turn back into adaption, where the behavior was already specified in the genome, in the someway that bacteria takes on different behavior that already was coded for. Evolution will continue to "evolve" as different aspects of the current theory is debunked and evolutionary scientists need to postulate on other ways to explain the gaps.

One day there's going to be a big "oh shit" moment when we sit back and realize that we are nothing more than well designed carbon based robots who've been given a form of natural intelligence. And, the quest to find our maker will take on a more earnest priority.

The more we study the genome the more we learn that "Junk DNA" is a cop out. It's a a way for a lazy researcher to say, since I don't understand it, it must be "junk". A big part of the Onion's "junk" DNA is now understood to provide structural support.

That's proof positive you either did not read or did not comprehend the article Wheels linked to, since the author specifically said he does not endorse the use of the term "junk DNA", and never used that term in context.

This is the problem with the evolutionary backing responses. You ask why the sky is blue and the reply is your too young to understand.

I explained why your statement about the sky being purple isn't true. I gave you abiogenesis/evolution the equivalent of the Rayleigh-scattering talk after you told us that the sky is purple because of space clams. I would have been a lot less harsh on you if you didn't pretend to know about the subject enough to reject the mainstream explanations and assert your own nonsense.

Quote:

The more we study the genome the more we learn that "Junk DNA" is a cop out. It's a a way for a lazy researcher to say, since I don't understand it, it must be "junk". A big part of the Onion's "junk" DNA is now understood to provide structural support.

This doesn't actually work as an explanation. Why do related species need almost five times as much "structural support" as their cousins? Why do onions needs so much more "structural support" than humans? Why does one species of lungfish require not only more "structural support" than us, but nearly 380 times more than a pufferfish? Why do some knock-out studies removing up to a whole percent of mouse DNA do nothing?

Quote:

The "junk" DNA in humans is now understood to provide a repositary of data for the functioning DNA to draw from. Interesting how the "junk" twists and bends in close proximity to the code that accesses it.

Calculations of the minimum amount of non-coding DNA for humans to function show that the number is only about 5%. All functional human genes (coding DNA) only account for 2%. So that's 7% we can assign some kind of function to (and only some of that is things like "provides structural support" or "encodes proteins").

Quote:

It fails to satisfy and to those who look at it as an explanation for the diversity around us, it fails to satisfy that as well. One day evolution will simply turn back into adaption, where the behavior was already specified in the genome, in the someway that bacteria takes on different behavior that already was coded for.

That will happen as soon as we observe the Earth to be cube-shaped. You don't understand that we have already seen novel features and new genes come into being. This isn't something that was simply latent in the genome, re-activated at the right time by a flipped switch. It requires a new part to be created and installed. Indeed, there's not really any mechanism for such a view (that all potential genetic information already exists and is simply not manifesting right now) to be made real. We have already debunked your idea. This is why I'm treating you like you need to go back to school before you spout off.

The more we study the genome the more we learn that "Junk DNA" is a cop out. It's a a way for a lazy researcher to say, since I don't understand it, it must be "junk". A big part of the Onion's "junk" DNA is now understood to provide structural support.

That's proof positive you either did not read or did not comprehend the article Wheels linked to, since the author specifically said he does not endorse the use of the term "junk DNA", and never used that term in context.

In context Wheels was making a false argument then. He was trying to show that simply because an Onion had more DNA than a human, evolutionary theory must be true. It's just the opposite, how would evolutionary explain the need to screate so much structural DNA in an Onion, but know it's not necessary in a human. What's that intelligent mechanism that tells random combinations keep a line of code because a billion years from this its going to be necessary to form a functioning eye. It's like evolution has another coder looking over it's shoulder and telling it this line we'll need for this segment of code for this other routine we are going to take another billion of years to randomly form. Nonsense.

Write a random generator, truly random if you can. Have it randomly spit out characters. After every generation, try to bring those characters to life by compiling them in a simple compiler and try to execute them. Do this for the equivalent of trillions of years in computer cycle time. You will never get anything to generate a "hello world" or anything close to that. Mathematical probability says its impossible. And that's with the help of an intelligent human providing the computer and the original generators. Evolution is grossly unsatisfactory as a theory to anyone who has searched beyond these pedestrian debates.

But not far enough beyond to actually learn the science behind evolution, or for that matter the extensive field of mathematics/computer science that actually studies your hypothetical: Genetic algorithms.

And in genetic algorithms the solution to this "conundrum" is the same as in biological evolution, and is one point of the basic two-point description of evolution that you simply cannot have failed to have heard in these "pedestrian" debates: Selection.

In genetic algorithms it's called the "fitness function". It's a way of judging how good a proposed solution is. By starting with a random population, selecting the best, copying them with random modifications, and repeating, you select for improvement and prevent regression and can rapidly converge on a local maximum for whatever it is you're optimizing. I have personally used GAs to develop a Tic-Tac-Toe playing program with an AI, a bit more sophisticated than just "hello world". It didn't even take very long.

When GAs are used to solve a real-world problem, defining the fitness function can be the most important and challenging part. The GA has no preconceptions about what the solution should be other than it should satisfy the fitness function to a maximal extent. Which is one of the strengths of GAs, as they can "invent" novel solutions. It's also a weakness, because sometimes our unspecified preconceptions have a good motivation for them.

E.g. some folks used GAs to program programmable logic chips and discovered that the solution had parts that were unconnected to the rest. Assuming this was random cruft, as a random algorithm may tend to generate, they manually deleted it. The chip stopped working. Turns out that it was using the "unconnected" bit as part of an analog circuit integral to the operation of the chip. Which is cool, and demonstrates how GAs can take advantage of capabilities that it isn't made in any way directly aware of, but the thing is we like digital circuits because they're more resistant to process and environmental variation.

In biological evolution, the "fitness function" is simply Natural Selection: That which survives to reproduce, survives to reproduce.

Minus Natural Selection, biological evolution could not work. Just like minus the fitness function, Genetic Algorithms couldn't optimize their way out of a paper bag. With them, well...

I would be shocked if anyone who understands genetic algorithms doesn't believe that biological evolution is capable of explaining the diversity of life.

abiogenesis plus evolution is another layer of excuses give to a kid to try and get him to stop asking why and be satisfied that a stork simply delivers the baby. It's my point, keep separating the stuff out of the theory that doesn't work and can't be proven and your left with an amazing well designed ecology all interdependent systems both biologically and naturally and somehow had to be timed perfectly for life to flourish.

The more we study the genome the more we learn that "Junk DNA" is a cop out. It's a a way for a lazy researcher to say, since I don't understand it, it must be "junk". A big part of the Onion's "junk" DNA is now understood to provide structural support.

That's proof positive you either did not read or did not comprehend the article Wheels linked to, since the author specifically said he does not endorse the use of the term "junk DNA", and never used that term in context.

In context Wheels was making a false argument then. He was trying to show that simply because an Onion had more DNA than a human, evolutionary theory must be true. It's just the opposite, how would evolutionary explain the need to screate so much structural DNA in an Onion, but know it's not necessary in a human.

Because evolution doesn't care about that. Random events happen that make things different.

Quote:

What's that intelligent mechanism that tells random combinations keep a line of code because a billion years from this its going to be necessary to form a functioning eye. It's like evolution has another coder looking over it's shoulder and telling it this line we'll need for this segment of code for this other routine we are going to take another billion of years to randomly form. Nonsense.

That simply doesn't happen. You clearly don't know what you are talking about.

abiogenesis plus evolution is another layer of excuses give to a kid to try and get him to stop asking why and be satisfied that a stork simply delivers the baby. It's my point, keep separating the stuff out of the theory that doesn't work and can't be proven and your left with an amazing well designed ecology all interdependent systems both biologically and naturally and somehow had to be timed perfectly for life to flourish.

How can you not see the irony in what you just said? Saying "Because God Willed It" is exactly like saying storks bring babies.

Ecology is not "well designed". It happens to interconnect because creatures co-evolve with each other. Nothing has been "perfectly timed."

The more we study the genome the more we learn that "Junk DNA" is a cop out. It's a a way for a lazy researcher to say, since I don't understand it, it must be "junk". A big part of the Onion's "junk" DNA is now understood to provide structural support.

That's proof positive you either did not read or did not comprehend the article Wheels linked to, since the author specifically said he does not endorse the use of the term "junk DNA", and never used that term in context.

In context Wheels was making a false argument then. He was trying to show that simply because an Onion had more DNA than a human, evolutionary theory must be true. It's just the opposite, how would evolutionary explain the need to screate so much structural DNA in an Onion, but know it's not necessary in a human.

Because evolution doesn't care about that. Random events happen that make things different.

In fact, evolution doesn't care about anything, and his anthropomorphisms do not a problem make.

In context Wheels was making a false argument then. He was trying to show that simply because an Onion had more DNA than a human, evolutionary theory must be true.

No, I'm showing why your explanation (an intelligent designer that only makes something with a function) is not true. It doesn't even work. The more you know about genes and biology the less appealing the idea becomes, because it fails to explain what we see. For people like you, who don't know much, it seems appealing because you only see the superficial similarities instead of the systematic differences.

Quote:

It's just the opposite, how would evolutionary explain the need to screate so much structural DNA in an Onion, but know it's not necessary in a human.

Because to a certain extent, evolution is about what's denied rather than what's permitted. This is one of the simple, key aspects of evolution by Natural Selection. If there is no significant cost to an organism having a bunch of useless DNA, then there isn't much pressure to remove that useless DNA. DNA proliferates with errors. Sometimes genes are copied incorrectly, sometimes they are copied more times than is strictly necessary. This error-prone replication tends to created extra DNA over time, unless there's a significant advantage to shedding it. Bacteria have very small genomes; they efficiently shed extraneous DNA that would otherwise have accumulated over time. The likely reason why bacterial genomes tend to be smaller than the genomes of eukaryotes (plants, fungi, animals, etc.) is because eukaryotes have dedicated cellular machinery that efficiently converts food into energy. We have chloroplasts and mitochondria, which most bacteria lack. Because we can so efficiently generate energy for our cells from the same amount of food, our cells have a bigger "energy budget" that can be used to overcome the cost of having big genomes. We're like rich people that can afford to keep warehouses full of stuff versus a poor family (bacteria) who live out of their car. So we have less incentive to throw anything away, even if it's useless. It's not as if onions need all that extra DNA (otherwise, why do some onions have four times as much as their fellows?), but they simply don't have a compelling reason to get rid of it. Why would they have it in the first place? Because biology is NOT all about clean and consistent "design," it's more like an irrational hoarder, accumulating baggage and junk because it has nobody telling it to clean house. All that extra DNA isn't hurting the onion enough for natural selection to favor onions with smaller genomes. So any errors in genetic replication that result in the accumulation of extra, useless DNA is permitted to continue. It's simply not interfering with the onion's ability to produce lots of viable offspring, so it can't be out-competed by an onion with slightly less DNA. Neither is all that DNA a clear advantage, either. It's simply there.

Quote:

What's that intelligent mechanism that tells random combinations keep a line of code because a billion years from this its going to be necessary to form a functioning eye.

That's not how it works. Eyes evolve out of ad-hoc changes, not pre-planned ones. Eyes have independently evolved in separate animal lines, using different sets of genes each time. In each separate line, the genes available to develop eyes were different. They were all probably doing different jobs at the time, but random genetic changes altered the way they worked in those other jobs and made them more suitable for detecting light. Eyes came about by co-opting existing features and roping them into eye duty, slowly modifying them along the way to make more efficient eyes.

And in genetic algorithms the solution to this "conundrum" is the same as in biological evolution, and is one point of the basic two-point description of evolution that you simply cannot have failed to have heard in these "pedestrian" debates: Selection.

.

Are you really satisfied with "Selection." A mechanism that was postulated before we even knew what DNA was? What mechanism in selection removed the advantages of an Ape's feet prehensility over a humans? Two differently coded systems. Did Selection magically throw away the code and magically write knew code to express feet differently in humans? And how did that occur? One line of code every million presciently written to anticipate the whole sequence billions of years later. How did it know that's the line of code it needed to select without anticipating the next line much less the overall function? Talk about blind faith in religion!

The more we study the genome the more we learn that "Junk DNA" is a cop out. It's a a way for a lazy researcher to say, since I don't understand it, it must be "junk". A big part of the Onion's "junk" DNA is now understood to provide structural support.

That's proof positive you either did not read or did not comprehend the article Wheels linked to, since the author specifically said he does not endorse the use of the term "junk DNA", and never used that term in context.

In context Wheels was making a false argument then. He was trying to show that simply because an Onion had more DNA than a human, evolutionary theory must be true. It's just the opposite, how would evolutionary explain the need to screate so much structural DNA in an Onion, but know it's not necessary in a human.

Because evolution doesn't care about that. Random events happen that make things different.

In fact, evolution doesn't care about anything, and his anthropomorphisms do not a problem make.

The more we study the genome the more we learn that "Junk DNA" is a cop out. It's a a way for a lazy researcher to say, since I don't understand it, it must be "junk". A big part of the Onion's "junk" DNA is now understood to provide structural support.

That's proof positive you either did not read or did not comprehend the article Wheels linked to, since the author specifically said he does not endorse the use of the term "junk DNA", and never used that term in context.

In context Wheels was making a false argument then. He was trying to show that simply because an Onion had more DNA than a human, evolutionary theory must be true. It's just the opposite, how would evolutionary explain the need to screate so much structural DNA in an Onion, but know it's not necessary in a human.

Because evolution doesn't care about that. Random events happen that make things different.

In fact, evolution doesn't care about anything, and his anthropomorphisms do not a problem make.

Absolutely not. We want them to ask why, become evolutionary biologists, and find out the exact mechanisms that resulted in the evolution of these traits. You'd rather shut down inquiry by invoking a Grand Designer for which there is no evidence.

It's just the opposite, how would evolutionary explain the need to screate so much structural DNA in an Onion, but know it's not necessary in a human. What's that intelligent mechanism that tells random combinations keep a line of code because a billion years from this its going to be necessary to form a functioning eye. It's like evolution has another coder looking over it's shoulder and telling it this line we'll need for this segment of code for this other routine we are going to take another billion of years to randomly form. Nonsense.

Plants tend to have more complicated genetics than animals because plants by and large can't move, so activating and deactivating genes are their only way of responding to the environment. More complicated genomes were adaptive for plants, therefore selected for by Natural Selection.

It's not intelligent at all, simply a phenomenon operating as blindly as a rock rolling down a hill. Adaptive changes cause an organism to be more successful and reproduce more, increasing the occurrence of that adaptation in the population. Maladaptive changes cause an organism to be less successful, reducing the occurrence of that trait in the population.

For a piece of genetic code to stick around for a billion years, it was probably serving a function that whole time, though it may have been different. It's hypothetically possible that a piece of non-coding DNA was kept around all that time because it wasn't maladaptive and then a mutation caused it to become coding and serve a useful function, but it's more likely to be useless or harmful. In the case of the eye, every step along its development was useful and adaptive, and there are even examples of these steps.

And in genetic algorithms the solution to this "conundrum" is the same as in biological evolution, and is one point of the basic two-point description of evolution that you simply cannot have failed to have heard in these "pedestrian" debates: Selection.

.

Are you really satisfied with "Selection." A mechanism that was postulated before we even knew what DNA was? What mechanism in selection removed the advantages of an Ape's feet prehensility over a humans? Two differently coded systems. Did Selection magically throw away the code and magically write knew code to express feet differently in humans? And how did that occur? One line of code every million presciently written to anticipate the whole sequence billions of years later. How did it know that's the line of code it needed to select without anticipating the next line much less the overall function? Talk about blind faith in religion!

It's unsatisfactory in the least.

It's unsatisfactory to you because you clearly do not understand it and you seem unwilling to attempt to understand it.

In context Wheels was making a false argument then. He was trying to show that simply because an Onion had more DNA than a human, evolutionary theory must be true.

No, I'm showing why your explanation (an intelligent designer that only makes something with a function) is not true. It doesn't even work. The more you know about genes and biology the less appealing the idea becomes, because it fails to explain what we see. For people like you, who don't know much, it seems appealing because you only see the superficial similarities instead of the systematic differences.

Quote:

It's just the opposite, how would evolutionary explain the need to screate so much structural DNA in an Onion, but know it's not necessary in a human.

Because to a certain extent, evolution is about what's denied rather than what's permitted. This is one of the simple, key aspects of evolution by Natural Selection. If there is no significant cost to an organism having a bunch of useless DNA, then there isn't much pressure to remove that useless DNA. DNA proliferates with errors. Sometimes genes are copied incorrectly, sometimes they are copied more times than is strictly necessary. This error-prone replication tends to created extra DNA over time, unless there's a significant advantage to shedding it. Bacteria have very small genomes; they efficiently shed extraneous DNA that would otherwise have accumulated over time. The likely reason why bacterial genomes tend to be smaller than the genomes of eukaryotes (plants, fungi, animals, etc.) is because eukaryotes have dedicated cellular machinery that efficiently converts food into energy. We have chloroplasts and mitochondria, which most bacteria lack. Because we can so efficiently generate energy for our cells from the same amount of food, our cells have a bigger "energy budget" that can be used to overcome the cost of having big genomes. We're like rich people that can afford to keep warehouses full of stuff versus a poor family (bacteria) who live out of their car. So we have less incentive to throw anything away, even if it's useless. It's not as if onions need all that extra DNA (otherwise, why do some onions have four times as much as their fellows?), but they simply don't have a compelling reason to get rid of it. Why would they have it in the first place? Because biology is NOT all about clean and consistent "design," it's more like an irrational hoarder, accumulating baggage and junk because it has nobody telling it to clean house. All that extra DNA isn't hurting the onion enough for natural selection to favor onions with smaller genomes. So any errors in genetic replication that result in the accumulation of extra, useless DNA is permitted to continue. It's simply not interfering with the onion's ability to produce lots of viable offspring, so it can't be out-competed by an onion with slightly less DNA. Neither is all that DNA a clear advantage, either. It's simply there.

Quote:

What's that intelligent mechanism that tells random combinations keep a line of code because a billion years from this its going to be necessary to form a functioning eye.

That's not how it works. Eyes evolve out of ad-hoc changes, not pre-planned ones. Eyes have independently evolved in separate animal lines, using different sets of genes each time. In each separate line, the genes available to develop eyes were different. They were all probably doing different jobs at the time, but random genetic changes altered the way they worked in those other jobs and made them more suitable for detecting light. Eyes came about by co-opting existing features and roping them into eye duty, slowly modifying them along the way to make more efficient eyes.

The answer is always, it's just random, it's just evolution don't bother me with the mechanism or complexity of all of it. Do you have any idea of the computational power of the eye, the different system that have been integrated together to form a picture and how well that has been integrated with the Mind's eye so what you are really seeing is not in the eye but in the mind which uses a very sophisticated pattern matching system on objects that it already has identified. Do you know how childish your explanation sounds to me. Look at computational photography and try to understand the math involved in just combining three photos together to form one HDR still much less a panoramic moving image that is connected to objects in the mind.

And in genetic algorithms the solution to this "conundrum" is the same as in biological evolution, and is one point of the basic two-point description of evolution that you simply cannot have failed to have heard in these "pedestrian" debates: Selection.

.

Are you really satisfied with "Selection." A mechanism that was postulated before we even knew what DNA was? What mechanism in selection removed the advantages of an Ape's feet prehensility over a humans? Two differently coded systems. Did Selection magically throw away the code and magically write knew code to express feet differently in humans? And how did that occur? One line of code every million presciently written to anticipate the whole sequence billions of years later. How did it know that's the line of code it needed to select without anticipating the next line much less the overall function? Talk about blind faith in religion!

It's unsatisfactory in the least.

It's unsatisfactory to you because you clearly do not understand it and you seem unwilling to attempt to understand it.

Nice form, attack the questioner. The problem is that evolutionary scientists don't understand it either. That's the problem. People say they understand because they think otherwise they will be mocked. Like you're doing. The reality is that its a piss poor theory with so many holes and leaving so much unanswered, that the only answer is lets throw billions and billions of years at it and somehow it just all works, don't you mind those troubling details. It's just random.

And in genetic algorithms the solution to this "conundrum" is the same as in biological evolution, and is one point of the basic two-point description of evolution that you simply cannot have failed to have heard in these "pedestrian" debates: Selection.

.

Are you really satisfied with "Selection." A mechanism that was postulated before we even knew what DNA was? What mechanism in selection removed the advantages of an Ape's feet prehensility over a humans? Two differently coded systems. Did Selection magically throw away the code and magically write knew code to express feet differently in humans? And how did that occur? One line of code every million presciently written to anticipate the whole sequence billions of years later. How did it know that's the line of code it needed to select without anticipating the next line much less the overall function? Talk about blind faith in religion!

It's unsatisfactory in the least.

It's unsatisfactory to you because you clearly do not understand it and you seem unwilling to attempt to understand it.

Nice form, attack the questioner. The problem is that evolutionary scientists don't understand it either. That's the problem. People say they understand because they think otherwise they will be mocked. Like you're doing. The reality is that its a piss poor theory with so many holes and leaving so much unanswered, that the only answer is lets throw billions and billions of years at it and somehow it just all works, don't you mind those troubling details. It's just random.

You aren't bothering to process anything that we have said! It's a miracle you are able to use a computer let alone form coherent sentences.

EDIT: People who don't understand it aren't mocked. People who don't understand it AND make derisive claims about it are mocked.

Absolutely not. We want them to ask why, become evolutionary biologists, and find out the exact mechanisms that resulted in the evolution of these traits. You'd rather shut down inquiry by invoking a Grand Designer for which there is no evidence.

I never invoked a grand designer, you did. It's the old game of I can't answer you but your theory is just a bit more ridiculous than mine. Forget the grand creator theory if you will. Let's stick to evolution.

And in genetic algorithms the solution to this "conundrum" is the same as in biological evolution, and is one point of the basic two-point description of evolution that you simply cannot have failed to have heard in these "pedestrian" debates: Selection.

.

Are you really satisfied with "Selection." A mechanism that was postulated before we even knew what DNA was?

Natural Selection is the mechanism that decides whether an organism and its traits are allowed to reproduce and spread, by virtue of the direct cause-and-effect of them being able to reproduce and spread or not.

And it's satisfactory, because it works regardless of the specifics of the precise mechanism of inheritance, so long as it copies the traits of the ancestor to the descendent, while allowing for changes in the process (via mutation, or crossover in sexual reproduction, or even horizontal gene transfer). The mathematics of Genetic Algorithms backs this up.

What's amazing is that this was proposed before the actual biological mechanism of inheritance was known. That it should exist, and have the broad properties necessary to combine with Natural Selection to create the diversity of life, was a great insight and successful prediction of evolutionary theory.

Quote:

What mechanism in selection removed the advantages of an Ape's feet prehensility over a humans?

We stopped living in trees.

Quote:

And how did that occur?

A mutation, or combination of genes carried by parents, caused their descendent to have less prehensile and more solid feet more adaptive to traveling on flat ground, increasing their fitness for their niche and thus causing the gene to spread. Further changes along this line would also be selected for, until we have the foot we have today.

Quote:

One line of code every million presciently written to anticipate the whole sequence billions of years later. How did it know that's the line of code it needed to select without anticipating the next line much less the overall function? Talk about blind faith in religion!

What makes you think that non-prehensile feet had to be anticipated billions of years before? Apes and their prehensile feet hadn't even been around that long.

Absolutely not. We want them to ask why, become evolutionary biologists, and find out the exact mechanisms that resulted in the evolution of these traits. You'd rather shut down inquiry by invoking a Grand Designer for which there is no evidence.

I never invoked a grand designer, you did. It's the old game of I can't answer you but your theory is just a bit more ridiculous than mine. Forget the grand creator theory if you will. Let's stick to evolution.

Ohhh, righhhht, suuure. So what's your alternative to evolution, since you claim to understand biology so well?

EDIT: And yet, you said this above:

Quote:

well designed carbon based robots who've been given a form of natural intelligence

It's just the opposite, how would evolutionary explain the need to screate so much structural DNA in an Onion, but know it's not necessary in a human. What's that intelligent mechanism that tells random combinations keep a line of code because a billion years from this its going to be necessary to form a functioning eye. It's like evolution has another coder looking over it's shoulder and telling it this line we'll need for this segment of code for this other routine we are going to take another billion of years to randomly form. Nonsense.

Plants tend to have more complicated genetics than animals because plants by and large can't move, so activating and deactivating genes are their only way of responding to the environment. More complicated genomes were adaptive for plants, therefore selected for by Natural Selection.

It's not intelligent at all, simply a phenomenon operating as blindly as a rock rolling down a hill. Adaptive changes cause an organism to be more successful and reproduce more, increasing the occurrence of that adaptation in the population. Maladaptive changes cause an organism to be less successful, reducing the occurrence of that trait in the population.

For a piece of genetic code to stick around for a billion years, it was probably serving a function that whole time, though it may have been different. It's hypothetically possible that a piece of non-coding DNA was kept around all that time because it wasn't maladaptive and then a mutation caused it to become coding and serve a useful function, but it's more likely to be useless or harmful. In the case of the eye, every step along its development was useful and adaptive, and there are even examples of these steps.

So a complex non-coding DNA magically appeared, spontaneously, stuck around and in another stroke of magic became functional. Some magical event combined it with other magically spontaneously created strands to magically create an eye. This magically integrated with a different complex system in the mind so that the eye having no useful function for itself became useful to the mind and so as whole was decided that it must be kept around. I forgot the answer simply is Randomness over billions of years that's what makes this all possible.

And in genetic algorithms the solution to this "conundrum" is the same as in biological evolution, and is one point of the basic two-point description of evolution that you simply cannot have failed to have heard in these "pedestrian" debates: Selection.

.

Are you really satisfied with "Selection." A mechanism that was postulated before we even knew what DNA was? What mechanism in selection removed the advantages of an Ape's feet prehensility over a humans? Two differently coded systems. Did Selection magically throw away the code and magically write knew code to express feet differently in humans? And how did that occur? One line of code every million presciently written to anticipate the whole sequence billions of years later. How did it know that's the line of code it needed to select without anticipating the next line much less the overall function? Talk about blind faith in religion!

It's unsatisfactory in the least.

It's unsatisfactory to you because you clearly do not understand it and you seem unwilling to attempt to understand it.

Nice form, attack the questioner. The problem is that evolutionary scientists don't understand it either. That's the problem. People say they understand because they think otherwise they will be mocked. Like you're doing. The reality is that its a piss poor theory with so many holes and leaving so much unanswered, that the only answer is lets throw billions and billions of years at it and somehow it just all works, don't you mind those troubling details. It's just random.

Actually biologists and paleontologists spend a great deal of time trying to answer the questions about how specific things occurred and have found a great many fascinating answers. It just turns out that answering every question of "how did A get to B?" for every "A" and "B" in the entire tree of life is a bit challenging.

However we know that Random Changes + Selection + Many Generations can yield good solutions to complicated problems. I mean it's not hard to use inductive reasoning to see that this is the case, but we can actually demonstrate it. People have actually tried it. It works. So...

Absolutely not. We want them to ask why, become evolutionary biologists, and find out the exact mechanisms that resulted in the evolution of these traits. You'd rather shut down inquiry by invoking a Grand Designer for which there is no evidence.

I never invoked a grand designer, you did. It's the old game of I can't answer you but your theory is just a bit more ridiculous than mine. Forget the grand creator theory if you will. Let's stick to evolution.

Ohhh, righhhht, suuure. So what's your alternative to evolution, since you claim to understand biology so well?

EDIT: And yet, you said this above:

Quote:

well designed carbon based robots who've been given a form of natural intelligence

Well-designed... hmmmmmmmm.... And what designed us, prey tell?

Randomness over billions and billions of years. If you kept rolling a rock down a hill over billions and billions of years, you can make simply anything, in fact you can make everything. Oh I see now, it's all making sense. Where do I go pray to this magical god of evolution.

Absolutely not. We want them to ask why, become evolutionary biologists, and find out the exact mechanisms that resulted in the evolution of these traits. You'd rather shut down inquiry by invoking a Grand Designer for which there is no evidence.

I never invoked a grand designer, you did. It's the old game of I can't answer you but your theory is just a bit more ridiculous than mine. Forget the grand creator theory if you will. Let's stick to evolution.

Ohhh, righhhht, suuure. So what's your alternative to evolution, since you claim to understand biology so well?

EDIT: And yet, you said this above:

Quote:

well designed carbon based robots who've been given a form of natural intelligence

Well-designed... hmmmmmmmm.... And what designed us, prey tell?

Randomness over billions and billions of years. If you kept rolling a rock down a hill over billions and billions of years, you can make simply anything, in fact you can make everything. Oh I see now, it's all making sense. Where do I go pray to this magical god of evolution.

And in genetic algorithms the solution to this "conundrum" is the same as in biological evolution, and is one point of the basic two-point description of evolution that you simply cannot have failed to have heard in these "pedestrian" debates: Selection.

.

Are you really satisfied with "Selection." A mechanism that was postulated before we even knew what DNA was? What mechanism in selection removed the advantages of an Ape's feet prehensility over a humans? Two differently coded systems. Did Selection magically throw away the code and magically write knew code to express feet differently in humans? And how did that occur? One line of code every million presciently written to anticipate the whole sequence billions of years later. How did it know that's the line of code it needed to select without anticipating the next line much less the overall function? Talk about blind faith in religion!

It's unsatisfactory in the least.

It's unsatisfactory to you because you clearly do not understand it and you seem unwilling to attempt to understand it.

Nice form, attack the questioner. The problem is that evolutionary scientists don't understand it either. That's the problem. People say they understand because they think otherwise they will be mocked. Like you're doing. The reality is that its a piss poor theory with so many holes and leaving so much unanswered, that the only answer is lets throw billions and billions of years at it and somehow it just all works, don't you mind those troubling details. It's just random.

Actually biologists and paleontologists spend a great deal of time trying to answer the questions about how specific things occurred and have found a great many fascinating answers. It just turns out that answering every question of "how did A get to B?" for every "A" and "B" in the entire tree of life is a bit challenging.

However we know that Random Changes + Selection + Many Generations can yield good solutions to complicated problems. I mean it's not hard to use inductive reasoning to see that this is the case, but we can actually demonstrate it. People have actually tried it. It works. So...

You've seen spontaneously generated strands of genetic code that selectively combines with other spontaneously generated code to create an independently living life form?

Absolutely not. We want them to ask why, become evolutionary biologists, and find out the exact mechanisms that resulted in the evolution of these traits. You'd rather shut down inquiry by invoking a Grand Designer for which there is no evidence.

I never invoked a grand designer, you did. It's the old game of I can't answer you but your theory is just a bit more ridiculous than mine. Forget the grand creator theory if you will. Let's stick to evolution.

Ohhh, righhhht, suuure. So what's your alternative to evolution, since you claim to understand biology so well?

EDIT: And yet, you said this above:

Quote:

well designed carbon based robots who've been given a form of natural intelligence

Well-designed... hmmmmmmmm.... And what designed us, prey tell?

Randomness over billions and billions of years. If you kept rolling a rock down a hill over billions and billions of years, you can make simply anything, in fact you can make everything. Oh I see now, it's all making sense. Where do I go pray to this magical god of evolution.

Are you really satisfied with "Selection." A mechanism that was postulated before we even knew what DNA was? What mechanism in selection removed the advantages of an Ape's feet prehensility over a humans? Two differently coded systems. Did Selection magically throw away the code and magically write knew code to express feet differently in humans? And how did that occur? One line of code every million presciently written to anticipate the whole sequence billions of years later. How did it know that's the line of code it needed to select without anticipating the next line much less the overall function? Talk about blind faith in religion!

It's unsatisfactory in the least.

It's unsatisfactory to you because you clearly do not understand it and you seem unwilling to attempt to understand it.

Nice form, attack the questioner. The problem is that evolutionary scientists don't understand it either. That's the problem. People say they understand because they think otherwise they will be mocked. Like you're doing. The reality is that its a piss poor theory with so many holes and leaving so much unanswered, that the only answer is lets throw billions and billions of years at it and somehow it just all works, don't you mind those troubling details. It's just random.

Actually biologists and paleontologists spend a great deal of time trying to answer the questions about how specific things occurred and have found a great many fascinating answers. It just turns out that answering every question of "how did A get to B?" for every "A" and "B" in the entire tree of life is a bit challenging.

However we know that Random Changes + Selection + Many Generations can yield good solutions to complicated problems. I mean it's not hard to use inductive reasoning to see that this is the case, but we can actually demonstrate it. People have actually tried it. It works. So...

You've seen spontaneously generated strands of genetic code that selectively combines with other spontaneously generated code to create an independently living life form?

No, it's just too easy.As Louis Black puts it, "They are stone...cold...fuck...nuts"And they are. I have no problem with that. But when they change laws to reflect their religion on the public, that's oppressive.

Actually biologists and paleontologists spend a great deal of time trying to answer the questions about how specific things occurred and have found a great many fascinating answers. It just turns out that answering every question of "how did A get to B?" for every "A" and "B" in the entire tree of life is a bit challenging.

However we know that Random Changes + Selection + Many Generations can yield good solutions to complicated problems. I mean it's not hard to use inductive reasoning to see that this is the case, but we can actually demonstrate it. People have actually tried it. It works. So...

They've spent a lot of time trying to explain why the previous theory was wrong and why their new one finally answers the questions that no one seems to be able to answer. But for most pedestrians the religion of Randomness and Selection is enough and they stop asking anymore questions because they are told they simply are too dumb to understand any better. The reality is that a lot more work needs to be done and evolution in its current form is not any good a theory than Ham's literal 24 hour days of creation. Evolutionists say that 0+0=1 and creationists tell us that 0+1=7. I don't like either answer.

Are you really satisfied with "Selection." A mechanism that was postulated before we even knew what DNA was? What mechanism in selection removed the advantages of an Ape's feet prehensility over a humans? Two differently coded systems. Did Selection magically throw away the code and magically write knew code to express feet differently in humans? And how did that occur? One line of code every million presciently written to anticipate the whole sequence billions of years later. How did it know that's the line of code it needed to select without anticipating the next line much less the overall function? Talk about blind faith in religion!

It's unsatisfactory in the least.

It's unsatisfactory to you because you clearly do not understand it and you seem unwilling to attempt to understand it.

Nice form, attack the questioner. The problem is that evolutionary scientists don't understand it either. That's the problem. People say they understand because they think otherwise they will be mocked. Like you're doing. The reality is that its a piss poor theory with so many holes and leaving so much unanswered, that the only answer is lets throw billions and billions of years at it and somehow it just all works, don't you mind those troubling details. It's just random.

Actually biologists and paleontologists spend a great deal of time trying to answer the questions about how specific things occurred and have found a great many fascinating answers. It just turns out that answering every question of "how did A get to B?" for every "A" and "B" in the entire tree of life is a bit challenging.

However we know that Random Changes + Selection + Many Generations can yield good solutions to complicated problems. I mean it's not hard to use inductive reasoning to see that this is the case, but we can actually demonstrate it. People have actually tried it. It works. So...

You've seen spontaneously generated strands of genetic code that selectively combines with other spontaneously generated code to create an independently living life form?

THE "CODE" IS NOT SPONTANEOUSLY GENERATED.

If you learn one thing from this conversation, that should be it.

OK, so you're saying code slowly forms bit by bit over billions of years, presciently the code itself knows somehow that it needs to stick around for billions of years and only combine with a specific other piece of code to eventually form a chain that will somehow be sparked into activity. Somehow it will survive the billions of years, magically reproduce though the code for reproduction doesn't exist yet, and somehow in this large universe find other code that somehow formed and somehow know how to interface with each other and form an extremely simple life form that will somehow know that it needs to join it's code with other code over and over again for billions and billions of years in a perfect environment, without dying till reproduction is coded and bingo a human is made. I understand your theory very well. Makes perfect sense. Reminds me of the first program I ever wrote when I 1 years old and my mom gave me a crayon.

What you have to do is abandon the assumption that evolution involves pre-planned directions, and start from scratch. Now, you have to look at a wide variety of available information and decide whether intentional design or ad-hoc changes undergoing selective pressures are the best explanation for what you see. Scientists have been doing this for more than a century now, and the more we learn about the workings of living things the more apparent it becomes that they have all these distinctive features because of jury-rigging things instead of coming at them from a clean blueprint and following a carefully laid-out plan ahead of time. The human body is full of jury-rigged features that don't make any sense if they were the product of intentional, rational, competent design. They make excellent sense once you accept the idea that features of ancestral organisms can show up in modern ones. The reason men are prone to hernias is because of the way our reproductive systems changed from those of fish. The reason that the nerves in your face are tangled mess is because of how our skulls have changed from those of fish. Cold-blooded animals don't have to worry about their sperm getting too hot to be viable. Warm-blooded mammals usually do. So as part of the evolution of mammals, our testes had to "punch" through the lining of our body walls in order to descend outside the body where temperatures are more favorable. The process weakens the body wall and allows inguinal hernias to form much more easily at those weak spots. Does that seem like intelligent design to you? The reason our cranial nerves are such a tangled maze in and around our skulls is because they are laid out much more sensibly in fish, a little less sensibly in amphibians and reptiles, and somewhat worse in other mammals, but especially badly in humans. All these cable management nightmares happened because of the way our skulls changed throughout the course of evolution from fish to land animals to humans (with pushed-in faces). We can see this happening almost in real-time by studying the development of vertebrate embryos. Doing so, we can see their common structure and similar layout in the early stages. In reptiles and mammals, extra complications are added as gill arches turn into ear bones and jaws instead. The more different the resulting structure is from the layout of a fish, the more likely it is to change the course of a cranial nerve. It gets so bad that our recurrent laryngeal nerve takes a long and unnecessary detour underneath a massive blood vessel in our chest on its way from the brain to the voice box. If our heads and bodies were still laid out like a fish, this wouldn't be the case. But because our present structures are A) derived from those of a fish, but B) significantly altered after hundreds of millions of years of evolution, we're stuck with this literal work-around. It's not what we'd expect from a clean-sheet design. The reason our spines are segmented and grow the way they do is because of genes that controlled the development of worm-like creatures from the distant past, from which we're descended. The same genes show up in everything from rabbits to insects, so the last common ancestor of humans and bugs must have had the same genes that control such body plan development. The fact that these genes are so important to all living animals meant that when we found them in insects, we had a reason to think that derivatives of those genes would exist in everything from parakeets to people. That turned out to be the case. Without the framework of evolution, we wouldn't have any reason to suspect the same genes to be in play and wouldn't have had cause to look for them. If we stumbled across them, it would have been a surprise to note their similarity to the genes in bugs. Both modern fruit flies and modern humans inherited this specific type of gene from a common ancestor, so it makes sense to find such genes in one and realize that they should be doing the same thing in the other. The function of those genes is so important that we wouldn't expect them to change very much, since changing too much would mess up embryonic development and be a deleterious (bad) change that's selected against by evolution.

Except I just got done telling you how it's not random. Pay attention, please. I'm sick of repeating myself.

Quote:

...it's just evolution don't bother me with the mechanism or complexity of all of it.

Except I just got done telling you how the mechanism behind it all works. Pay attention, please. I'm sick of repeating myself.

Quote:

Do you have any idea of the computational power of the eye, the different system that have been integrated together to form a picture and how well that has been integrated with the Mind's eye so what you are really seeing is not in the eye but in the mind which uses a very sophisticated pattern matching system on objects that it already has identified. Do you know how childish your explanation sounds to me. Look at computational photography and try to understand the math involved in just combining three photos together to form one HDR still much less a panoramic moving image that is connected to objects in the mind.

I understand quite a bit about our human eye. I also know quite a bit about other kinds of eyes in other organisms. Even Charles Darwin understood this much. He went into decent detail explaining how the types of eyes we see in living creatures represent models of how human eyes could evolve from other, more primitive structures through a progression of increasingly complex and capable intermediate stages. He got the basics pretty much right. There are plenty of animals with far less computational power devoted to processing visual signals than us, their eyes are not useless. If we look at living things with different eyes and brains from ours (or even no brains at all), we can see how the path from the earliest photo-sensitive cells to human eyes (and even the much more sophisticated and elegantly-designed cuttlefish eyes, which lack our vertebrate-type eyes' weakness of a backwards retina). Indeed, much interesting research in both biology and sensor technology has been devoted to simplifying vision systems to match those of animals that aren't us. From brainless jellyfish to insect brains that operate on the equivalent of a few dozen transistors, there are a plethora of eyes and brains that don't match up with the kind of complex thing you're talking about. Between them and us lies another gradient of increasing complexity and capability. It is not a great leap from a simple photocell to the human eye, it's a series of small and manageable steps. Just like almost everything in evolution.

Actually biologists and paleontologists spend a great deal of time trying to answer the questions about how specific things occurred and have found a great many fascinating answers. It just turns out that answering every question of "how did A get to B?" for every "A" and "B" in the entire tree of life is a bit challenging.

However we know that Random Changes + Selection + Many Generations can yield good solutions to complicated problems. I mean it's not hard to use inductive reasoning to see that this is the case, but we can actually demonstrate it. People have actually tried it. It works. So...

They've spent a lot of time trying to explain why the previous theory was wrong and why their new one finally answers the questions that no one seems to be able to answer. But for most pedestrians the religion of Randomness and Selection is enough and they stop asking anymore questions because they are told they simply are too dumb to understand any better. The reality is that a lot more work needs to be done and evolution in its current form is not any good a theory than Ham's literal 24 hour days of creation.

Why yes, scientists have spent a great deal of time finding the answers via evolutionary theory, quite successfully too.

So why do you deride the "pedestrian" summary of Randomness + Natural Selection, but then not actually seek out these answers? Why do you assume things for how eyes "must" have developed instead of actually looking at what the study of life has revealed about their origins? Why do you insist its no better than YEC when actually evolution in its current form has a ridiculous litany of demonstrable success?

I won't disagree with "more work needs to be done", but when that's equivalent to saying the theory is no better than a non-scientific non-theory, then you're simply not distinguishing at all.

Quote:

Evolutionists say that 0+0=1 and creationists tell us that 0+1=7. I don't like either answer.

It's really more like evolutionary biology says eiπ = -1, and you're upset because that just seems weird and illogical to you, even though there's fairly simple math that demonstrates that it is true. You just don't want to bother with it, and justify that by assuming that nobody else has worked out the math either, and therefore can equate it to "faith" which you're just too smart to buy into.

Nice form, attack the questioner. The problem is that evolutionary scientists don't understand it either. That's the problem. People say they understand because they think otherwise they will be mocked. Like you're doing. The reality is that its a piss poor theory with so many holes and leaving so much unanswered, that the only answer is lets throw billions and billions of years at it and somehow it just all works, don't you mind those troubling details. It's just random.

You aren't bothering to process anything that we have said! It's a miracle you are able to use a computer let alone form coherent sentences.

I assume you're giving him the benefit of the doubt on the latter? They are largely parsable, but coherent?